SATA and motherboard?

  • Thread starter Thread starter esara
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esara

Hi
Could you please tell in order to have a SATA HD in my computer, do I
need a mother board supporting SATA connection?? Is it really very
noticable in term of speed and performace between SATA and regular IDE
hard drive??
Thanks
 
esara said:
Hi
Could you please tell in order to have a SATA HD in my computer, do I
need a mother board supporting SATA connection?? Is it really very
noticable in term of speed and performace between SATA and regular IDE
hard drive??
Click to expand...

You need a motherboard with an SATA controller or a
separate PCI SATA controller in order to use an
SATA drive. There is no performance difference
as long as the drive specs are the same.
 
SATA will not make today's drives faster. What will make them faster is
newer, faster controllers. This is the case with Intel's ICH5/ICH5R
controllers. They are faster than the integrated ATA133 regardless of
supported bandwidth. A Promise SATA controller will also be faster than
an Intel ATA133 controller. But so will a Promise ATA133 and so will a
Highpoint ATA or SATA. Is it noticeable? Not much really.
 
esara123 said:
Could you please tell in order to have a SATA HD in my computer, do I
need a mother board supporting SATA connection?? Is it really very
noticable in term of speed and performace between SATA and regular IDE
hard drive??
Click to expand...

SATA by itself does not improve performance of your hard drive(s).
However, if you add two identical drives and use RAID to stripe them,
you'll see a marked improvement in speed. You don't need SATA for that,
however. RAID striping will give you increased performance with EIDE as
well.

The primary advantage of SATA right now is getting the drives off your
IDE bus to free up slots for additional IDE drives. My motherboard has
SATA, so I'm running two 200 gig drives striped, a CDRW/DVD combo drive,
a DVD burner, a ZIP drive and a removeable IDE hard drive for backup.

The hard part was getting the system to boot to the SATA drives when the
removable IDE drive is installed. I had to do a BIOS upgrade to get
this support.

--Dave
 
esara said:
Could you please tell in order to have a SATA HD in my computer, do I
need a mother board supporting SATA connection?? Is it really very
noticable in term of speed and performace between SATA and regular IDE
hard drive??
Click to expand...

You can buy a PCI SATA controller card.

The performance advantage for current on-board SATA is primarily in the on-board
RAID 0 capability. If you don't use RAID 0, the overall performance will be
limited mainly by the specific HD you use.

Though SATA may have a theoretical 150 Mbps bandwidth, a PCI solution will be
limited by the PCI bandwidth -- 133 Mbps for 32-bit PCI, which is the same as
IDE/ATA133. Of course, you will seldom see anywhere near max bandwidth use with
current HD technology. RAID 0 will take advantage of the simultaneous use of 2
HD heads, partially overcoming the "choke point" in the HD interface.
 
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